viz. - fashion

Headless Fashion Photos: The Human Body as Mannequin

Deb Streusand — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 00:35:43 +0000

Image credit: Favim.com

While seeking inspiration for this post, I combed the internet for interesting fashion photos. I noticed an odd trend. Many of the photos showing off particular outfits cut the photo off at around shoulder height on the model, like this:

Image credit: Favim.com

Such photos emphasize the outfit over the model’s looks, which I guess is helpful for those who want to envision themselves wearing the outfit without feeling like they need to look like a model to wear it. But they’re also a little creepy. Their argument seems to be “your body is more important than your face,” which has unfortunate implications when one considers how much more personality is expressed in the movements of one’s face than in the shape of one’s body. (Yes, I’m still thinking a lot about body positivity.) The photos sell the outfit as making the buyer's body look good, changing something over which she has a little more control than the appearance of her face. In the process, however, they make the person in the photo look considerably less like a human being and more like a mannequin. In fact, many mannequins are headless, and some fashion photos show headless mannequins in all their glory – that is, with their headlessness fully exposed.

Image Credit: Indiamart.com

To make a human into a mannequin for the sake of selling clothing is pretty alarming, but it’s also a logical extension of the practice of using conventionally attractive human beings as moving displays of fashion. Anything that might be contained in the human being’s head or heart is irrelevant to the aim of conveying the product’s value. At its best, fashion can be an expression of personality, a way to affirm one’s self-image to the world. Yet the process of selling fashion rarely reaches for this best. Headless fashion photos are a particularly problematic example of this failure. They can’t possibly express the personality of the wearer, because they don't even show her face! While a headed model can express some of her personality through acting, the headless photos have none of this. They advertise what fashion can do for your body, not how it can express your personality.

One odd fact of note: some Pinterest users actually collect such photos, tagging them “headless” in addition to the series of other descriptors. I’d like to ask them why they want these photos in particular, because even after looking at a whole bunch for this article, I'm still creeped out by the headless fashion photos.

Tags:

fashion

advertising

Visual Rhetoric

“Kids These Days”: The Not-at-all New Phenomenon of Fashionable Childhood Sexualization

Aubri Plourde — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 17:00:06 +0000

Last year, when Miley Cyrus gave us this delight:

Image Credit: Mirror

the interwebs exploded with home critics—often sloppy analyses of Cyrus’s performance, rife with moral judgment and fear for the future. The outrage regards not whether the singer is talented, or whether her show was successful, but over her behavior, and, especially, her clothing.

Of course, a large part of this reaction to the VMA show was due to the “weirdness” of Cyrus’s dances-with-bears schtick. Still, we’d be naive to overlook the role of her clothes in this kind of backseat judgment. Many of the blog posts, op-eds, and social media comments linked the VMA performance with Cyrus’s then-new video, “Wrecking Ball,” pointing out the “provocative” dress as a sign of the girl’s unstable nature or corrupted innocence. “Where is Hannah Montana?” these articles bemoaned. The issue seems to be not only the amount of skin shown, but that Cyrus is a girl dressed too maturely.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

I don’t want to reduce all the pushback here to Cyrus’s age. Of course, this little blowup raises interesting questions about the public performance of one’s sexuality, about an artist’s attempt to transition from child to adult, about the public’s need to police her body. All of those concerns, I take as the given subtext of this kind of event. I’d like to focus, specifically, on the way that this issue has been framed as a kind of violation of maturity, wherein the clothes represent a certain age category, one many audiences see as inconsistent with the performer’s actual—or “appropriate”—level of maturity.

Actually, this kind of link between clothing and age is a strange inverse of what M. Gigi Durham calls the “Lolita Effect,” “a construction of sexuality that both exploits and limits sexual expression and agency, and is deliberately focused on young girls.” Here, sex is associated with youth, and young bodies are then co-opted both to support the demands of sexual management and to mobilize standards for older women as well. We see this effect both in the way the Toddlers in Tiaras are dressed as much older, hyper sexualized women and in the way older women are then infantilized. For example:

Image Credit: Oh No They Didn't

Image Credit: Stop Toddlers and Tiaras

Here, we’re outraged because these toddlers are dressed up as women. We cannot tolerate the concept of child sexuality—despite the fact that every solid study on childhood development acknowledges it. On the other hand, these:

Image Credit: Steven Meisel

Madonna did this photoshoot for Vanity Fair in 1992. The public seems to have a love-hate relationship with these images. They serve up female bodies; fashion facilitates the role of the viewer as couch critic, so that we can all bemoan the downhill spiral of the way “Society” is going these days. I think it’s important to include Madonna in this discussion not only because these images offer a counterpart to Toddlers & Tiaras, but also because they remind us that this phenomenon is not in any way new. Durham, for example, charts a whole series of sexualized girls (JonBenet Ramsey, Brooke Shields, The Little Mermaid...). Here, more than two decades ago, we have Madonna performing hyper sexualized girlhood through a fashion shoot. The adult female is sexy because she’s childish. So all of these panicked responses to Miley, the fear-mongering that suggests we have somehow crossed a threshold in the female sex/fashion industry, might do well to remember, as Don Draper tells us in another blithely misogynist episode (s01e04) of Mad Men: “Maybe every generation thinks the next one is the end of it all. Bet there are people in the Bible walking around, complaining about kids today."

Tags:

What Makes an Award-Winning Costume Design?

Deb Streusand — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 02:30:41 +0000

Image Credit: wardrobesupplies.com

You may or may not have noticed that the Oscar for Best Costume Design went to The Grand Budapest Hotel this year. Like most of the winners in this category in the recent past, the movie is a period piece. In the last 25 years, only one movie that is not technically a period piece has won Best Costume Design, and it was The Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King. The fantasy movie, however, is effectively a period piece from a fashion perspective, with its medieval-style aesthetic. You have to go back to 1979 to find a Best Costume Design winner that is in no way a period piece: Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical All That Jazz. What do these costumes look like? I could only find a couple of pictures, but here they are.

Image Credit: Laser Blast Film Society

Image Credit: Serendipity Cinema

Based on the winners of the past 25 years, one might say that an award-winning costume designer immerses the audience in the environment of the story. All That Jazz is mostly set in theaters doing musicals, so it makes sense that the glitzy costumes pictured above would win – costume designer Albert Wolsky seems to have immersed his audience in the environment of Fosse’s theatrical career. Wolsky’s designs are costumes pretending to be costumes, apparently with great success.

All costumes pretend, of course. They pretend to be ordinary clothing, but they are always making an argument about the character’s identity. A good costume designer shapes that argument to fit with the story, of course, but perhaps this type of success isn’t as easy to identify as whether costumes convincingly simulate the clothing of a given historical period. Perhaps this is why period pieces generally win the Best Costume Design Oscar: it’s easy to argue for why they should.

Tags:

fashion

movies

oscars